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RandySF

(82,420 posts) Tue Feb 10, 2026, 04:09 PM Tuesday

How Pa. Democrats plan to ensure midterm election security

Pennsylvania Democrats are hoping to run up the score and win decisive victories in four key congressional races this fall in order to shore up the US House and prevent any election tampering by President Donald Trump or US House Republicans.

“ We’re gonna run up to score to such a level that [US House Speaker Mike Johnson] won’t have a choice,” Eugene DePasquale, Chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, told reporters at the party’s winter state committee meeting in Harrisburg on Saturday.

If congressional races are close following Election Day or disputed by Trump and the Republicans, Johnson has the ability to delay swearing in members, and over the past week, Johnson began echoing false statements about mail-in voting and ballots being counted following Election Day.

Last fall, Johnson waited 50 days to swear-in US House Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) after she won her special election in order to prevent her from signing onto a discharge petition forcing a vote to release the Epstein Files.

https://keystonenewsroom.com/2026/02/09/how-pa-democrats-plan-to-ensure-midterm-election-security/

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How Pa. Democrats plan to ensure midterm election security (Original Post) RandySF Tuesday OP

It's really embarrassing when the head of the PA Dem party doesn't know how congress works Fiendish Thingy Tuesday #1

Fiendish Thingy

(22,533 posts)

1. It's really embarrassing when the head of the PA Dem party doesn't know how congress works

Reply to RandySF (Original post)

Tue Feb 10, 2026, 04:33 PM

Tuesday

Unless he’s talking about four special elections to fill vacant seats before Election Day (that I haven’t heard anything about and the excerpt didn’t mention), Mike Johnson won’t have any say about not seating newly elected members because he will not be speaker at the opening of the next congress on January 3, 2027.

On that date, all the members-elect, as certified by their respective states gather at the Capitol and choose a speaker. Since there will be more Dem members-elect than Republicans, the next speaker will be a Democrat, who will then swear in the rest of the House en masse.

There is a mechanism where a member-elect can rise and object to the seating of another member-elect, but such a move would set off a cascade of tit-for-tat objections, resulting in nobody getting sworn in that day, which is why it has never happened (Hawaii’s first rep is the single asterisk AFAIK).

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